Tag Archives: Jim McGinn

A long time ago Portland dancer and choreographer Jim McGinn worked deep inside the mine shafts running into the mountain near Leadville, Colorado. It was hard and dangerous work, claustrophobic and stultifying. He never forgot.

I spent the evening, for the most part, simply feeling the interplay between performers and sound, concentrating on the essential musicality of dance, which often comes with stories attached but at its deepest level doesn’t really need them, because, like music, dance is essentially unexplainable. Only afterwards did I read the program notes and discover the story that inspired McGinn. In a way that was a good way to go, because it gave me two experiences: the first, essentially emotional and existential; the second, reflective and intellectual. Put ’em together and you get a sense of how the human animal works.

Feels like spring. Finally. Mr. Scatter is cavorting about town in short-sleeve shirts, anticipating the day after the Rose Festival’s Grand Floral Parade, when the rains might taper off for good and we can start thinking about summer. O gray, gray Puddletown: We’ve had about enough of you. Let the colors begin.

In this morning’s Oregonian Mr. Scatter reviews Gust, the new hour-long piece by Jim McGinn’s contemporary dance troupe TopShakeDance, at Conduit. Gust is also weather-driven: It’s about wind, which can be fierce in the skeleton of winter but really knows no season, and it’s quite good. Repeats tonight and next Thursday-Saturday, May 26-28. Tickets here.

The country ladder of success: Of course, around Puddletown a marginally nice day in spring is often an excellent excuse for a drive out the Columbia River Gorge, where the weather’s a little drier, the temperature’s a little warmer, and the views are slap-your-forehead spectacular. Plus, these days, there’s good coffee, good wine, and good stuff to eat.

Folks around Hood River have been busily promoting the valley’s spring charms, and one good bet looks to be Mosier artist John Maher‘s installation Running Fruit Ladders, a half-mile stretch of brightly colored 14-foot-tall orchard ladders that runs along Highway 35 (the back route to Mt. Hood) in front of the White House and Mt. Hood Winery. The ladders are continuing to run through May, so you still have a chance. Besides looking, we assume, really cool, the installation is a nice reminder of the high valley’s rich tradition of growing and harvesting some of the best fruit in the land. It’s also an obvious nod to Cristo and Jeanne-Claude‘s Running Fence, which famously rippled across Sonoma and Marin counties in the 1970s. Mr. Scatter had the great good fortune of running across that spectacular exhibition unawares, with no prior knowledge that it existed, and being utterly gobsmacked. The experience remains one of the artistic highlights of his life.

After a whirlwind fling with white asparagus, Belgian beer, briny mussels, fish stews, canal-skimming tour boats and close encounters with the likes of Memling, Van Eyck, Rembrandt, Vermeer, De Hooch, Michelangelo, Cocteau, Picasso, Van Gogh, Frans Hals and Jan Steen in places where a church that began life in 1408 is known as the “Nieuwe Kerk” (the Oude Kerk, from 1306, is still hanging around, too) Mr. and Mrs. Scatter have needed a little jog to get back in the swing of things in good old Puddletown.

For Mary Oslund, the child’s sense of infinite possibilities has never ended. How else could she have made Childhood Star, her stunningly beautiful new piece, in which she seamlessly mixes every form of movement that has touched her life as a dancer and choreographer?

Commissioned by White Bird, for which we owe them our everlasting thanks, Star premiered at PSU’s Lincoln Performance Hall on Thursday night. (It repeats tonight and Saturday.) Like most of Oslund’s work, it is first and foremost about dancing itself, and an ongoing exploration of what the human body can accomplish aesthetically. It contains, of course, the movement vocabulary Oslund has developed over several decades – long-limbed extensions, geometric shapes, duets involving contact between dancers that initiate movement phrases – but there is also a breakthrough here: a new musicality, a softening of phrasing, a balancing of the emotional and the intellectual that make the piece achingly lovely to watch.

Art Scatter’s indefatigable chief dance correspondent Martha Ullman West, fresh from a sojourn in the Big Apple, hit the ground running on her return to Portland. In a week and a half she took in the Northwest Dance Project’s fall show, White Bird’s presentation of the Hofesh Shechter Company, Jim McGinn and Carla Mann’s “Exquisite Corpse,” and Imago Theatre’s teetering version of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit.” Herewith her report on her adventures:

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In the past 10 days I’ve witnessed four performances, three of them easily classified as dance, the fourth, if we must be Aristotelian about this, as physical theater.

For my New York colleagues this would have been a light schedule. For me it was pretty packed.

Not that I’m complaining — it’s terrific, particularly in these times, that we get to see so much performance in our town. Portland artists are brave and bold, even when the work may not be, and White Bird continues to provide us with dance that ranges from the phenomenal (Baryshnikov and Ana Laguna) to the intriguing (Hofesh Shechter).

Let us begin with the Northwest Dance Project, which I attended opening night at the Newmark, on Friday the 16th. In a pre-curtain speech, executive director Scott Lewis stressed the importance of presenting new work, pointing with considerable pride to a program made up entirely of “world premieres” — a term which, like “world class” and pre-curtain speeches themselves, I wish would get lost in the stratosphere.

His pride in Dance Project artistic director Sarah Slipper’s new work, Not I, is justified. While I wish I had known when I was watching Andrea Parsons perform this very demanding and emotion-laden solo that the monologue she was dancing to was the uncredited Samuel Beckett’s — and while the video monitor on stage was a bit too reminiscent of Bill T. Jones’s controversial Still/Here, which also dealt with bodies raddled by illness and minds sinking into dementia — Slipper’s jitter-laden, despairing movement has stayed with me. And it’s passed this sure test: I’d like to see it again. Moreover, it was the only piece on this program that had a discernible beginning, middle and end.

But new does not necessarily mean good. Nor, necessarily, bad. Except for Not I, the work commissioned for this concert ranged from the mediocre to the ordinary. There were moments in the second part of Edgar Zendejas’s Bu Ba Bee when I began to hope he was going to make use of the energy of the dancers in this young company, and he did create a quite fine solo for Patrick Kilbane. But nobody moved much in the three-part work, and what’s more, I never did figure out what any of them was about, or their relationship to each other.

At the conclusion of Bete Perdue, Mary Oslund’s beautiful new dance, singer Lyndee Mah, still in the glow, said it was like a symphony. I think she was talking about how it cascaded by, sometimes in unison, all eight dancers carving space similarly, according to his or her “voice,” sometimes in solos or duets or trios that mixed, matched and reformed, sometimes in pairs of duets or even four duets, weaving in and out, occasionally interlocking. It swept by, pulsing with action, small moments and large, establishing its own time. When it was over, how long had it been going on? It was hard to guess, it was so absorbing. And so, yes, like a symphony.

If someone had taken a psychogram of audience members during the performance it would have registered many different states, and that’s like a symphony, too. Let’s see: delight, reverie, anxiety, keen attention, even a series of undifferentiated states that could turn into almost anything, from aggression to love, the stem cells of all our emotions. But mostly satisfaction, not as in “fat and happy,” but as in this typifies the complexity, tension and release, and ultimate harmony of great art.

That’s not a claim I make lightly. But building on the great success of last year’s “Sky,” this dance finds Oslund creating something amazing at both the smallest and largest levels, micro and macro. A shoulder shrug from dancer Keely McIntyre sends a shiver of recognition and contains deep expressive possibilities. So does the rush of multiple dancers, arriving and departing, lifting and being lifted, sliding past each other in erratic orbits. Like a symphony, it’s too much for the brain to process, but you can “understand” it in your own particular way as a whole.